Sports Blogs are to Culture as Joe Morgan is to Baseball Stats
Fuck all you sports bloggers who are calling out Ben Roethlisberger. Especially you, Deadspin: The blog that regularly rewards its readers for submitting stories of attempted date rape. The blog vacillates wildly between upbraiding the media for covering a sex scandal and, you know, generating hundreds of thousands of pageviews by covering the selfsame sex scandal. It’s the blog that promulgates the already popular notion of athletes enjoying limitless access to sex.
What Roethlisberger has done is (very likely) maximally reprehensible, but his actions are made possible by the larger culture of sports, which is of course not in one of those airless, unpressurized spaces. The general social course of humanity—its telos, if you will—has been toward power becoming less centralized and more distributed. State of nature, social contract, end of slavery, universal suffrage, blah blah blah. Now, it’s the case that in nature, people with more power get to fuck literally and figuratively the people with less power. One of the marks of a great society is the attenuation of this state of affairs. You can make the argument that men should have power over women because they are better/faster/stronger/whatever. But an analogue to our historically expanding knowledge is the growth of empathy, which has created an increasing mutual understanding of shared humanity among progressively larger and larger communities: The men all hang tight together, then the men and women who look similar, then the men and women who are more proximal, and so on. All of a sudden, the United Colors of Benetton are trapped attractively together on an island east of Fiji as the first black President of America passes healthcare reform.
The idea that one person can have automatic access to another person’s body—especially the genital region—seems predicated on his/her belonging to a more powerful class. Like, duh. The universalizing telos I outlined above has been (perhaps obviously) misapplied in economic terms. Communism failed miserably. (Srsly. Fuck you, Žižek.) Obama isn’t a socialist, but people perhaps rightly criticize his socially leveling initiatives as economically deleterious. There are some hopefully obvious ways in which the progressive spirit has improved everyone’s lives. One way in which it has improved our lives is that the living is markedly less barbarous in many ways. Life is less violent. Sure, cinema finds more and many more ways to portray violence and destruction, but it seems like consuming the candy visual ideation of violence has paradoxically made life more docile and monotone. It’s boring: commuting to a desk job or janitorial gig, catching dinner from the Whole Foods salad bar, and falling asleep watching NCIS.
Celebrities and athletes are the new priest caste. South Park’s incisive portrayal of the celebrity-as-cultural-sacrifice recently very well comically reified what everyone’s always kind of known: Live Fast Die Young. In exchange for living out our least profound desires, we let ‘them’ get away with anything up to and perhaps including murder. In exchange, they die young (in the case of celebrities) or they use up their bodies in explicitly performative ways (in the case of athletes). It’s a (maybe the?) defining trope of Western Excellence: A young man who’s a profoundly awesome physical specimen gets his pick of women, excels on the battlefield, and dies promptly, young. I mean, I ask honestly and unironically (whatever that means), Who doesn’t want to be Achilles? I’ve always wanted to be Achilles, but I feel more of an Odysseus. Part of it is the fox-versus-hedgehog thing, but a lot of it has to do with the prevailing sensibility of Western discourse. You assert through excellence your immortality in a few different ways: You’re forever heralded and your exploits and adventures are preserved in legend. And perhaps just as importantly, you show yourself as a literally ideal mate—you pass on your genetic material. Gaining access to sex, then, isn’t an accidental reward of physical excellence: Sex is built into the idea of excellence.
Professional athletes—even the scrubs—have been excellent for most all of their lives. They’ve been winners at every level. And so they’ve had easy, automatic access to sex during that time. In the words of an above-linked Deadspin post, “Owning a letterman’s jacket is basically a license to tap ass.” Lauding an athlete’s excellence is, I claim, also lauding his “license to tap ass.” That’s the fantasy, isn’t it? Why do people of both sexes want to be a rock stars and celebrities? And since a lot of sports writing has to do with describing the unique physical fluency that excellent athletes assert over their adversaries, there is an attendant undercurrent of their privilege to assert their authority in economic, social, and sexual ways. Which is a very old problem, generally speaking. It existed before sports blogging, and it was much worse when the mainstream media (MSM, I call it. Yeah.) dominated the discourse.
There’s a lot of good sports blogging that makes its goal to point out the hypocrisy of the Common Man and the chummy Press Box Journalist. Fire Joe Morgan is my favorite blog (sports- or no) of all-time. Sports blogging can do a lot because it deals with an insanely popular topic that millions of people engage with. Which is why I am so disappointed with the treatment of Roethlisberger. Sports blogs make able sport of him. He has it coming. He’s a really easy, unlikable target. But it deflects or even obviates criticisms of the structural problems that create Roethlisberger-type situations daily. People are wont to say that there are no more heroes. And in athletics we still encounter a type of heroism. These two ideas are intrinsically related. We have fewer heroes because it’s repugnant, the level of power and privilege associated with heroism. Yet we laud athletes and reward them full-well knowingly with nearly any privilege. Even murder.
The responsibility of writing should be to its author’s idea of truth. And the responsibility of reading should be to the reader’s idea of truth. Rather than reward hypocritical blogs with pageviews, readers should take up pens (well, keyboards) and point out continuously the self-destructive, contradictory aims of the more powerful. Massive blogs like Deadspin should not get away with simultaneously glorifying and empowering the privileged athlete culture and also excoriating the obviously repulsive black sheep of that culture. The seemingly always-pellucid Katie Baker made an incisive post on Deadspin regarding a recent USA Swimming scandal:
But we shouldn’t be so narrowly focusing our outrage. Wielgus was inelegant, and I’ll bet incorrect, to say that abuse is “not nearly as serious in USA Swimming as it might be in the rest of society.” But he’s right that the rest of society has plenty to answer for. ABC’s report seemed uninterested in exploring the problem writ large.
ESPN, who teamed up with ABC News in reporting this story, will air its own show on the swimming scandals May 2 on Outside the Lines. I hope their reporters can broaden the story with more useful context rather than fussing around with shrill games of interview gotcha.
Her entire piece was evenhanded and didn’t give anyone an easy out. Because in life most people don’t have an easy out. Everyone’s a little dirty. That’s a given. But the project—as a progressive telos—is to be less dirty and to try to clean up the world a little bit. Getting pageviews from the exploits of celebrities and athletes, I’m not so naive as to think that even good blogs won’t do this. But they shouldn’t then try to get even more pageviews by wagging a finger at the very actions they’ve helped to encourage and enable. I’m going to dust off that old chestnut: I Get It. No one expects great things from Deadspin (even though there are some great things there, sometimes). Deadspin does a great job pointing out the hypocrisy of the MSM, even as the Gawker Empire tries to become part of it. I don’t believe in the concept of selling out. Everyone wants to sell out to some extent. But when your entire voice is based around being that incisively irreverent person in the room, you have to be above all honest about who you take shots at. It’s easy to snipe at Roethlisberger, and he has it coming. But so does everyone else.
On the latest Deadspin podcast, Adam Carolla expressed wonder at why people are so politically correct in the sports world. It’s the last bastion of blue collar, off-color, Guys’ Night Out-type culture. Who wants to see political correctness at the sports desk? I thought for the very reasons he mentioned: It is literally one of the last venues where a professional writer can be blatantly sexist, racist, and homophobic. You know those vicious VORPies who pillory old school GMs for measuring their players’ effectiveness in Wins or RBI? Well, the casually sexist/racist/homophobic sportswriter is that grizzled old GM. Shit’s getting more progressive, and you can either step on the train or get run over by it one scandal at a time.
